Recollections of Warriors, Redeployed Into Dance

Liz Lerman’s ‘Healing Wars’ at Arena Stage in Washington

In the foreground, Keith A. Thompson and Paul Hurley, an amputee veteran, dance in "Healing Wars," choreographed by Liz Lerman at Arena Stage in Washington.Credit
Matt Roth for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — During naval service in the Middle East, Paul Hurley lost a leg. Now he’s joined a dance company.

“I don’t really consider myself a dancer,” this 28-year-old veteran said, smiling. But what he’s involved in is more than a dance.

“Healing Wars,” which begins previews on Friday at the Arena Stage here, where it runs through June 29, is a mixed-media meditation on medicine in wartime created by Liz Lerman, a choreographer with a propensity for bending the conventions of dance casting: She has created works involving the elderly, shipyard workers and even people with Parkinson’s disease.

In “Healing Wars,” which draws parallels between the American Civil War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she incorporates movement, storytelling, music, digital projections — even flying hospital beds above the stage. Behind is an area that theatergoers will visit en route to their seats and where they will come into contact with characters played by, among others, the actor Bill Pullman; the dancer Tamara Hurwitz Pullman, his wife; and Mr. Hurley, one of several veterans who have contributed their stories in the project’s development.

Photo

Ms. Lerman.Credit
Matt Roth for The New York Times

“This has always been part of Liz’s thing, that it matters who’s doing the performing,” said Mr. Pullman, whose wife has a long association with Ms. Lerman. “Whoever is doing the movement brings their own personal richness to it all.” They’ve brought their own research, too: Mr. Pullman’s father was a Navy surgeon in World War II, and he also based his “Healing Wars” character on Dr. Richard Jadick, a Navy surgeon in Iraq. Ms. Lerman’s father, too, was a World War II veteran. Like many of their generation, neither man talked about his combat experiences. Which is a point of the show.

“When my father was on his deathbed he said, ‘Bury me in my uniform,’ ” Ms. Lerman said. “We’d never heard anything about the war, but this was obviously huge to him. And what we find with the vets we’ve talked to is that once they start talking, they can’t stop.” This includes Mr. Hurley, who has tended to run long during rehearsals with the story of his injury — the result of an attack in Bahrain in 2006, in which a close friend died.

“I kind of get in the moment,” Mr. Hurley said, “and watching Bill, I feel he kind of elevates everyone’s level. There’s a lot of creativity flowing back and forth. He might do something that makes me think of something, and I’ll drift off and remember details and have to pull myself back in. But I think we’ve rehearsed enough where I’m pretty comfortable.”

He may be, but “Healing Wars,” whose official opening is next Thursday, was in a semi-amorphous state during a tech rehearsal last week. Across the mostly bare stage — on which spoken narratives will move back and forth between the Civil War and the present, and alternate with dance — Keith A. Thompson performed a pas de deux with Mr. Hurley. Ms. Pullman interpreted Clara Barton, the Civil War nurse who went on to found the American Red Cross. The entire company, led by Ted Johnson, danced to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” closely following a projection of a viral 2010 “Telephone” video by Aaron Melcher danced by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Music was being finalized. So was movement.

The Arena’s artistic director, Molly Smith, said her theater’s Kogod Cradle was a perfect space for Ms. Lerman’s project, including those backstage “rooms” where characters meet their audience. “I can see a way in which Liz will still be able to maintain this no matter where she tours,” Ms. Smith said. But Jed Wheeler, executive director of Peak Performances at Montclair State University, which has supported the creation of “Healing Wars” financially (and with a residency for Ms. Lerman) and will host it Sept. 20 to 28, has ruled out that portion of the program. “I think the impact of the storytelling will improve for the audience if these elements are absorbed into the piece itself,” he said.

Photo

The actor Bill Pullman after a dress rehearsal of "Healing Wars" at Arena Stage.Credit
Matt Roth for The New York Times

Ms. Lerman’s original concept arose nearly three years ago, and it is now part of the National Civil War Project, a collaboration among universities and arts organizations in four American cities; Arena is partnered with George Washington University. At the time, Ms. Lerman’s husband, the storyteller Jon Spelman, was performing at the historic Ford’s Theater here, and she visited its warrenlike backstage.

“I envisioned all those rooms filled with solo artists doing stuff on Civil War,” she said. “And then the idea came that there’s probably been a lot of new scholarship in recent years, by African-American scholars, by women scholars. So let’s put together scholars and artists and see what happens.”

Ms. Lerman founded the Washington-area Dance Exchange troupe in 1976 (she left in 2011), and she was a 2002 MacArthur fellow. For “Healing Wars,” she said she was also inspired by tales she’d heard of women and girls who disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War as well as by what she has come to see as the inevitability of wars and the motivations of the men who fight them.

“We start them because we’re angry, but we perpetuate them because of love,” she said. “We’ve talked to lots and lots of veterans. They don’t redeploy because we’re in Afghanistan. They redeploy because of their friends, their brothers, their comrades. They don’t call it love, because it gets all mixed up with other things. But I think that’s what it is.”

“It’s intimacy men crave,” she added, “And war allows it.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 5, 2014, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Recollections of Warriors, Redeployed Into Dance. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe